The other night, I dreamed terrorists came and took over my house and family, holding us hostage. I am not making this up. Usually, I dream of dead relatives warning me about the men I date.
Anyway, in my dream, these terrorists in my house became lurkers, preparing to attack some gigantic U.S. symbol, while we, their hostages, powerlessly went about the most ordinary motions of our daily lives, waiting for their luggage to explode.
We were infested, infiltrated and, in my dream, which was clearly a nightmare, there seemed nothing we could do about it – except wake up.
Sometimes – Cheney-Bush-Rove-Rumsfeld-Rice-Wolfowitz-Poindexter-Kissinger notwithstanding – terrorism and torture truly do lurk in the most unsuspecting of places.
Like at the hairdresser’s.
Recently I had one of those hard-to-forget Real-Life Terror experiences. Upon deciding to color my hair again, I discovered “Lena,” my customary hairdresser, had gone missing. And in my holistic worldview, your typical brunette hair dye has been implicated as possibly carcinogenic – in short, definitely dangerous.
So, I contact my intermittent former hairdresser, the ever-ready “Thaddeus Razorfingers” – not his real name – who gives me an appointment the day before the Thanksgiving holiday, and agrees I may bring “natural” non-toxic herbal color for him to use on my hair instead of noxious chemicals.
Naturally, disaster and major trauma ensue!
“Thad” fancies himself an artiste and a sculptor with hair as his medium. Though I recall his slogan once was “This man wants to cut you,” his current motto might be, “You’ll like this haircut or else!”
Barely reading the instructions – like the genius he believes himself to be – he applies this “100 percent natural permanent color,” well, glops it on my head and, suddenly, my hair begins to smell like a tossed salad, inspiring alarming jokes from the shampoo girl.
So, guess what? My hair comes out … GREEN!
Not even a funky, punky shade. Suddenly my hair is the color of tarnish. Next, Thad then applies the darker color, kind of mahogany, which I had the foresight to bring along also, and it turns an even more awful shade of green, too. Twice!
Nothing he does changes it.
So, just as I’m sitting there under the dryer, baking and freaking out, green not with envy but with this awful misadventure, his receptionist slithers up to me and assails me with her nasal whine. “Oh, you don’t use chemicals?”
“No,” I reply.
“Why not?” she persists.
“Against my religion,” I say.
“Which is?” she queries.
Exasperated beyond belief, I mutter under my breath, “Martian.”
“Never heard of that one,” she responds.
Then she suggests I pay up because it’s 4:30 p.m. and she’s ready to leave for the holiday. “That will be $65 and $65,” she demands, without blinking.
“One hundred thirty dollars even though I brought my own color?” I bleat, stunned.
Were I not trapped under the dryer, maybe I would have contemplated Napalming the whole hair parlor. I’m totally traumatized. The sucker ruins my hair, then has the audacity to charge me 130 bucks for a few minutes of making mud-pies!
Um, how can I get a job like that?
Moreover, he wants me to return after the holiday, to “fix” the damage. He will apply “this new Japanese color that only stays on for five minutes.”
In other words, lethal chemicals.
“You’re going back?” inquires Doug, a New Jersey doctor. “Despite what he did to you? How codependent is that?”
Why not? Women and their hairdressers always have a love-hate relationship. Besides, this is how society helps keep women down – with huge recurring hair-care costs! But not nearly as staggering as the bill for what war with Iraq could cost the U.S. – perhaps nearly $2 trillion, almost equal to last year’s entire federal budget!
“Why’d you allow him to do it?” commiserates Joseph, the NOLA impresario. “This is precisely the reason I stopped having him cut my hair. He doesn’t listen to anyone!”
“There’s an Aime Cesar poem called ‘Your Hair.’ I thought about writing a parody called ‘Your Hairdo,'” says Jim, a Washington, D.C., editor-writer.
“Add some red and you’ll be ready for Christmas,” advises Marlene, a Chicago artist.
Sounds like a Dr. Seuss story, says my friend Lenny, the poetic physician’s assistant: “We ate yams, and stuffing, and giblets and ham. Waiting for the turkey sounded like a good plan. So we munched and we crunched the turkey till it was bare. When we looked up we saw our guest had green hair …”
And spam.
Has Trump 2.0 learned from Trump 1.0?
Josh Hammer